The premise that dare not speak its name

You may or may not be familiar with the comedy series Yacht Rock. It is a mock documentary and it makes fun of all sorts of stuff including pop music documentaries but the main joke is something no one dare say aloud.

Here, for example, is how the Wikipedia page describes it:

J. D. Ryznar and Hunter D. Stair devised the series after noticing the incestuous recording careers of such bands as Steely Dan, Toto, and The Doobie Brothers and the singer-songwriters Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald.

And then this:

The series depicts some realistic aspects of the music, but builds exaggerated storylines around them.  

What no one says anywhere that I have seen is that the exaggerated storylines are largely a matter of portraying blue-eyed soul stars from the late 1970s and early 1980s as behaving like West Coast gangsta rappers. And just doing this is really funny because it allows us to laugh at behaviour that it might otherwise be trick to be laughing at because ... well because gangsta rappers are mostly black guys. It's okay to laugh at real-life blue-eyed soul singers being portrayed this way.

It's genuinely funny because, just between you and me, everyone knows that gangsta rappers often behaved in ways that, even by the low standards of the pop music business, were morally moronic. You'd be reflexively accused of racism for laughing at Tupac and the way his death was shamelessly contorted into some sort of messianic story in order to sell more music but when it is represented as the story of legendary smooth rock producer named Koko Goldstein killed with a harpoon it's hilarious. Likewise the rumoured story of white rapper Vanilla Ice signing over the rights of his one hit after being hung by the heels from a window appears here as a story of movie producer Harold Ramis being hung off the edge of a roof by his heels.

Probably the edgiest moment is an episode in which rapper Nate Dogg has a hit based on a  sample of a Michael McDonald song. Dogg is presented as a guy who is too smooth for gangsta and who tries, unsuccessfully, to commit crimes to toughen his image. in real life, Dogg was a brutal thug of a man and a career criminal.

The cult status of the show protects it from getting the harsh treatment it would otherwise get.

It is a shame because there are issues here that deserve to have a lot more light shone on them. The audience for gangsta rap, for example, was mostly young white men making it seem a lot more like a modern minstrel show than any genuine expression of black identity. The same could be said of an awful lot of "black" music that is treasured as authentic by critics. The audience for smooth rock, OTOH, was mostly women and the general disdain it is held in by, mostly male, music critics ought to trouble us a lot more than it does.

It's a great little series by the way. Most of it is on YouTube. There are a couple of episodes that have the audio track deleted for legal reasons but you can easily find them elsewhere on the web through your favourite search engine.

And the music is darn fine. I remember not liking this stuff much when it was popular but it has held up a lot better than much of the music I did like and it has certainly aged better than any hip hop I can think of.  Here is a small sample.